From Errand to Fatal Shot to Hail of Fire to 17 Deaths (New Blackwater Shooting Details Revealed)

[Hissyspit]

Source: New York Times

From Errand to Fatal Shot to Hail of Fire to 17 Deaths

By JAMES GLANZ and ALISSA J. RUBIN
Published: October 3, 2007

- snip -

Interviews with 12 Iraqi witnesses, several Iraqi investigators and an American official familiar with an American investigation of the shootings offer new insights into the gravity of the incident in Nisour Square. And they are difficult to square with the explanation offered initially by Blackwater officials that their guards were responding proportionately to an attack on the streets around the square.

The new details include these:

- A deadly cascade of events began when a single bullet apparently fired by a Blackwater guard killed an Iraqi man whose weight probably remained on the accelerator and propelled the car forward as the passenger, the man’s mother, clutched him and screamed.

- The car continued to roll toward the convoy, which responded with an intense barrage of gunfire in several directions, striking Iraqis who were desperately trying to flee.

- Minutes after that shooting stopped, a Blackwater convoy — possibly the same one — moved north from the square and opened fire on another line of traffic a few hundred yards away, in a previously unreported separate shooting, investigators and several witnesses say.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/03/world/middleeast/03firefight.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

[Whoa_Nelly]

1. Ugly

More horror from and blood on the BushCo/PNAC hands

[kurth]

2. Everything Blackwater said was a LIE

as usual.

There is a reason mercenaries are not covered by the Geneva conventions.

[lonestarnot]

3. Did you expect something different?

[leftchick]

4. I would hope they listened to this victim

http://www.therealnews.com/web/index.php?thisdataswitch=0&thisid=449&thisview=item

one of the lucky ones. :(

[MISSDem]

5. This whole thing is outrageous! Toward the end these people

actually FIRED ON THE CARS FROM ABOVE IN HELICOPTERS!!!!